The Beast Diagnosis #8942, from the series The Beast Diagnosis

One Book One Northwestern, 2023–24

The abstract work of artist and biochemist Michael Koerner invokes the unseen biological processes that dictate our lives. A white blot and orbs surrounded by fibrous growths spread across the surface in the lower center of a dark metal plate. Koerner has explained that the blot, produced by a chemical reaction dropped onto the tin plate, signifies a tumor. The artwork is part of a series by Koerner that responds to his own family history. As a child, his mother lived near the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, leading to severe genetic complications in his family line. The artist developed this process, which leaves room for unpredictability, as a way of grieving the death of family members and dealing with his survivor’s guilt.

In Crying in H Mart, a memoir grieving the loss of her mother to cancer, Zauner attempts to come to terms with her family's history of cancer and to understand a process happening within the body that is not apparent from the outside. Descriptions she came across upon learning of her aunt’s diagnosis mirror Koerner’s abstract representation. She writes, “I googled adenomatous polyps, the little mushroom-shaped polyps, poisonous mushrooms that had blossomed into large, malignant flowers from the pinkish-brown tissue.”